Gates Foundation Pledges $1 Billion for AI Access Over 2 Years as Inequality Risks Grow
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Sep 15
Gates Foundation Pledges $1 Billion for AI Access Over 2 Years as Inequality Risks Grow
3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Sep 15
Summary
$1 billion will be spent over the next two years to widen global access to AI, with the Gates Foundation targeting health care, agriculture and education.
The foundation's Goalkeepers report said the window to shape who benefits is short, warning today's AI trajectory favors people and institutions able to pay first.
Language is a key gap: early large language models were trained largely on English data, leaving many communities underrepresented and prompting plans to fund more multilingual datasets.
Bill Gates has increasingly paired support for AI's potential with warnings about job losses and safety risks, urging governments and companies to prioritize people who stand to gain most rather than the most profitable users.